Eat for Your Good Health
diabetes, health care, healthy eating, olivia sanders, organic marketplace, restaurant, sprouts café,
Olivia Sanders knows firsthand how healthy eating can turn a person’s life around.
After a blood transfusion more than 30 years ago left her with hepatitis C, diabetes and liver and heart disease, Sanders’ future looked very grim.
“Doctors told me the disease would kill me, and there was nothing they could do but keep me comfortable,” Sanders recalls. “I started praying to God, asking Him to show me what to do.”
She discovered the answer to her health problems could be found in changing her diet.
“I took myself off all my medicines and quit eating meat and dairy. Instead, I began eating things like leafy greens and living foods, cucumber juice, wheat grass juice and carrot juice, and it started healing my body,” Sanders says. “In the first week, I no longer had high blood pressure, and eventually the diabetes went away. That was two years ago, and I’m now healed of the hepatitis C.”
Sanders was so enthusiastic about the positive effects of eating healthy, she opened Sprouts Café in the lower level of the Organic Marketplace in April 2006. The café offers fresh juices, smoothies, wraps, burritos, sandwiches, soups and a raw food and salad bar.
The menu includes several interesting sandwiches, including the Gorilla Crunch (almond butter, banana and honey), the Naked Avocado (avocado, spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, sprouts, and feta and havarti cheeses) and the See My Hummus (open-faced with hummus, tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, bell peppers, feta and havarti). All sandwiches come with potato salad or black beans.
And eating healthy doesn’t mean you have to skip dessert. Sprouts Café serves up strawberry cheesecake, raw fudge, a raspberry frozen delight and several fresh fruit pies.
The café also hosts free lectures and classes on healthy eating and diet supplements.
“Eating healthy makes you feel better, helps you get off medication, gives you more energy and lowers blood pressure and cholesterol,” Sanders says. “It changes lives – I’m a living testimony.”
Story by Jessica Mozo
Photo by Brian McCord
